Photograph of Joy Coghill

Joy Coghill

Actress
Director
Artistic Director
Theatre Producer
Teacher
Playwright
PAL Founder


I come to this moment today from a unique time in my life. With UBC having accepted my "papers", I have been getting help from the UBC library to tame and bring to heel the many boxes, marked carefully by Jack as "Joy Unsorted"! ... A kaleidoscope of moments of time and history - all in a box and discovered within a few minutes.

The experience [of going through the boxes] forced me to examine time itself and how it relates to history - my history and yours. Because we are privileged to be artists, we do not measure time in the accepted way. We know that one can live a lifetime in the last five minutes before we "go on" and that on the occasion when the play is "blessed", there is no time at all; the play is over even as it began.



From Joy Coghill's acceptance remarks as the recipient of the Leslie Yeo Award for Volunteerism from the Actra Fraternal Benefit Society in 2007.